


Vine and Fig Tree

by Sharksdontsleep



Category: Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: Afterlife, F/M, Gen, Heaven, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-23
Updated: 2016-01-23
Packaged: 2018-05-15 19:21:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,994
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5796784
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sharksdontsleep/pseuds/Sharksdontsleep
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Death is easy. Contentment is harder. </p><p>Hamilton gets bored in heaven.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Vine and Fig Tree

**Author's Note:**

> I'm at dontsleepsharks at tumblr and gmail. Feedback, including concrit, appreciated! 
> 
> Fic spoilers in the end notes.

After his death, time stretches in ways he hadn't thought possible.

"Is it a sin to be bored in heaven?" Alexander asks, maybe too loud. Heaven is very staid sometimes; it reminds him of paintings of the Constitutional Convention. They never get the yelling right.

"Only you, Ham, could be bored with all your earthly affairs settled." Laurens is here, and Washington, his son, his mother, the men he'd lost in the war, the tiny squalling infants Rachel dedicated to potter's field in St. Croix, Martha Washington's first husband.

"Is that strange, sir?" Hamilton asks one day, as he and Washington play chess. The game has been going on for either twenty minutes or a lifetime. It's hard to tell.

"I find that the nice thing about heaven is that there's time to discuss anything - and time to recognize that some discussions aren't worth having." Which isn't an answer, really.

Washington looks younger than when he died, though not _young_ exactly, but just as he did when Alexander met him - a veteran already, virile, vigorous, a man in his prime not yet made weary by war or government.

"Do I look to you as I did when we met?" Alexander asks.

"Yes," Washington says. "And no. You look young sometimes, fresh and full of vinegar and piss" - heaven, it seems, has made Washington more lax about swearing. Somewhere on earth, Lafayette must be delighted. "- and sometimes you seem older, as when I first took office."

"Still full of piss and vinegar, though."

"I'm sure eternity will age you into wine, young man," Washington says.

Philip is much the same to him: He blinks between an infant at Alexander's knee and a man nearly grown.

One day - as far as there are days in such a place - when Philip is about 12 or 13, Alexander, Washington, and he 'have a catch,' as Washington calls it, tossing a ball that manifests out of ether upon Washington's command. Hamilton wishes such things were possible in the world of the living until Washington, teasingly, asks if he would impart such powers onto Jefferson or, worse, Adams.

He laughs at Alexander's understandable horror.

They spectate as events in the world of the living unfold like a play, a set of actors executing a script that someone else has written. It's a view from 50,000 feet or perhaps not wide enough, a sweeping expanse of time and place and drama writ impossibly small, the sensation of watching an ant colony perform Shakespeare.

"At least it's not Macbeth," Laurens says, when Alexander is sputtering about Jackson.

"The way he governs, it should be," Alexander says. "His hands will never be clean."

Angelica is there, and Peggy, and she tells him they'll enact whatever Scottish tragedy he likes when Eliza comes, though she is as hale and vivacious as the day he met her, when he peers from heaven to see what she's up to.

He cannot concentrate on her for long - there are rules, he's sure, something to distinguish a soul from a common snooping ghost - and he does not like to linger, anyhow. He finds he cannot remember the smell of her hair, and the thought upsets him to tears. He manifests a handkerchief from the ether and dries his eyes. Some small injustices are beyond the will of the Divine, it seems.

Laurens finds him and does not ask, just sits beside him and lets him weep. 

“It seems like I’m always missing one of you,” he says.

“We’ll all be together soon enough, Ham,” Laurens says.

They go to a pub reminiscent of the first place they'd drunk together, toasting memories when Lafayette arrives. In some lights, there's gray in his hair and in others is as he was during the Revolution, young and bright with fury.

"You've made a great nation," he says, clapping his hand on Hamilton's shoulder solemnly. "Plus, they named a bunch of places after me. I went on tour."

Lafayette snaps to attention when Washington arrives, saluting, hand stiff against his forehead as tears well into his eyes.

"Lafayette," Washington says, and his voice is as soft as rain. "Son."

Laurens and Alexander leave them to their reunion.

There are books here, impossible numbers of them, unimaginable to him even as he'd envisioned the library at Alexandria, and he finds that his mind expands beyond its earthly scope, indexing as it goes. He reads and reads, plays, philosophy, political tracts.

Laurens finds him poring over a dense financial treatise written in Aramaic, which he can now read.

"All of eternity, and you're here," he says teasingly.

"I found you documenting the feeding patterns of turtles yesterday," Alexander says. "Hardly one to throw stones."

“Eternity has given me a newfound appreciation for life lived more slowly,” Laurens says. “Now let’s go get drunk.”

They spend a while in a soldiers' bacchanalia, drinking and carousing as much as the Divine allows. “Is it too much to say that heaven is between your thighs?” Alexander says, when they’ve been naked for several days, lounging and interspersing eating and fucking. 

“With lines like that one, the fact that you had eight children is a miracle,” Laurens says, laughing.

They tire of even that after a while, Laurens excusing himself back to his studies and encouraging Hamilton to do the same. 

“What’s the point of knowledge without action? I could hole myself up like the _sage_ of Monticello, but to what end? To what purpose?”

“The General spends most of his time at his farm,” Laurens says, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Perhaps he would appreciate a visitor.”

“I have as much business tilling earth as Jefferson did running a government,” Alexander says. Jefferson and he have reached the ‘polite nodding’ stage of what must be a millennia's worth of reconciliation. In another hundred years, they might have a conversation about the weather, which is, of course, always pleasant. 

But he goes to visit anyway. Washington shows him the house, the kitchen gardens, the fields. They walk to a side area of one of the yards, and Washington points to the grape arbor and a tree with tripartite leaves. 

“Forgive me, sir, I haven’t Laurens’ fondness for naturalism, but -” 

“Think, Alexander,” Washington says, sounding amused. “A vine and -”

“A fig tree. Yes,” he says, a little dumbstruck. “Of course.”

They sit there, in the pleasant shade, for a long time, Washington at ease and Alexander cataloging the grass in front of him, the way the blades seem almost blue-green, the soft hum of non-stinging insects. All the mosquitoes have been consigned to hell, it seems.

Washington notices his fidgeting. “I once wished to die on my farm rather than run the government,” Washington says.

“You did, sir.”

“There’s peace to be found here, Hamilton, if you let it. In heaven, as there was on earth.”

“I’m working on it,” Alexander says. “Turns out, dying is easy. Being dead is harder.” His mouth twists.

“Death is easy, son,” Washington says, with a sigh. “Contentment is harder.”

In time, Eliza arrives. Her hair smells like heaven - or perhaps the reverse. 

“My love,” he says, moving to embrace her. “You took your time.” His voice breaks, then, and he finds his legs cannot hold him. 

A re-creation of their old house appears around them, the worn sofa and fireplace. He sits on the floor, knees on a pillow, and Eliza sits, petting his hair as he rests his head on her lap. She tells him of the children, of the great monument to Washington in the fetid swamp of a city he helped make, of the time she threw James Monroe out of her house. 

“I’ve never known you to be so unchristian,” Alexander says. “Especially to a sitting president.”

“They elected _Buchanan_ ,” Eliza says. “Hardly a sacred office.”

The nation goes to war, and they watch, horrified, at Vicksburg, Fredericksburg, Gettysburg, Antietam. 

Soldiers stream in, young men at first, and then the infirm and young boys. Women too, battlefield nurses, some wearing union blues. A black regiment, the 54th Massachusetts - nearly 600 men at once - and Laurens stands there, speechless, until he calls for a round of drinks, and then another. 

Others hobble in, and Eliza begins shaping beds out of the ether, then entire hospital wings. She visits the men, sitting with them, and encourages Alexander and Laurens do the same. 

“Their wounds are healed,” Alexander says, when Eliza returns looking tired, or as tired as heaven allows. 

“Some wounds run deeper than others,” she says. 

She finds purpose in such work, in directing services, even in the infinite. “Heaven is never running out of bandages,” she says, one day, when he asks. 

Laurens disappears, at times, zooming to whatever natural place most suits his fancy, to spend time at the shoulders of Darwin and some Austrian monk he’s taken a fancy to, spouting something about peas and factors and gradualism that have Alexander politely nodding. 

“You have no idea, Ham,” he says. “We were revolutionaries, but this, this will change the _world_. Think of it! An age of reason, a biological age. How lucky we are to be alive - or well, you know.” 

Even with Eliza, and Laurens, and Washington, and the children, heaven is sometimes … dull. Eternity is very _nice_ , but there’s no point in debate, nothing to distract him from staring into the great Divine darkness and being a little bit bored.

He thinks of his time at the Grange, of the particular arrangement of flower beds, the stately parties, the Sunday mornings at the piano. It felt like heaven, but a peculiar kind. Life shuffled on in the face of grief, and such sweet things were like sugared delicacies, rendered even sweeter by the knowledge they could not last. 

Now, in the face of the everlasting, Alexander remains restless.

He annoys Eliza for a time at her hospital until she turns him out and tells him to go play with the children. Philip plays with the younger Angelica, both of them as they were when they were children, and Alexander lies in the grass with them and laughs until his belly aches. 

Laurens finds him there hours later, still in the grass, Philip and Angelica long since retired to other devices, staring up at the great inky nothingness of the sky. 

“What should I do, John?” he asks, looking up at Laurens, who's standing over him.

"Do what you always did, Ham," Laurens says, throwing up his hands. "Pick up a pen.”

He picks up not one pen, but many - or rather, he manifests as a spirit, an intercessor between the writer and the vast eternal pool of words, not fetching the right words exactly, but perhaps expediting their transfer. A muse, perhaps. 

“I would look good on an urn,” he says, and Laurens and Eliza roll their eyes at him.

He whispers over Lincoln's shoulder in his last days; stands as a ghostly presence to a muckraking lady journalist; rises again in New York, _in his city,_ in the '50s, alighting on a divan as a poet talks of dreams and the dangers of their deferment. He goes to a small town in Maine and watches as a man writes and drinks and writes, righting a bottle when he drops it and steadying his hand on the keys. 

He sails to Inwood, to the room of a boy his age when he left St. Croix, one for whom words come quick, rhyming like an old poet, but never quick enough for the boy's liking. He is gracious, this one, to everyone but himself, writes like there's never enough time, as if the universe is a ticking clock counting the seconds down to his inevitable end, even as his life is just beginning. This one will need his aid, Alexander thinks, for someone to sit at his right hand and say, ‘you will find the right word; trust; believe.’ And so he stays.

**Author's Note:**

> The writers that Hamilton visits:  
> \- Lincoln.  
> \- [Nellie Bly](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nellie_Bly)  
> \- [Langston Hughes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langston_Hughes) who wrote ['Harlem'](http://genius.com/1085655)  
> \- [Stephen King](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_King)  
> \- And LMM, of course!


End file.
